In the recent years we’ve all seen that the computer market was going down badly, while the smartphones increased tremendously.

But checking GlobalStats’ OS market shares today I found a big surprise (is it a Christmas present?): both Windows and macOS are now doing a lot better than just a few months ago. Windows overpassed Android again, while macOS broke the 6% percent share the first time after its 2015 fall (that – for people living in the north hemisphere – actually occurred in the summer), maybe helped also by iOS remaining at around 12%.

What happened, one may ask? This video explains it very well: the previous rumours suggesting that we’ve entered a “mobile-only era” (that I’ve wrote about myself a few times) have turned into a real fact with an important difference: it seems we’ve entered the “mobile+computer era” instead.

The recent PC and Mac sale issues may have therefore been caused just by the smartphone hype and implicit fear that such small devices could eventually replace large screens completely. That was somehow illogical, indeed, at least for businesses – my wife kept warning me about this – but many of us (included myself) started to believe it could happen; since markets – on such a long term like two or more years – weren’t expected to lie. (Probably they actually didn’t, and one just needed more experience to understand them while things went up and down, creating false trends which may have looked – at specific times – unbreakable.)

So, what does this mean for us, programmers? I guess we should still learn Android and iOS development (if we aren’t there yet) as the mobile duopoly is here to stay and computers’ return is not going to make smartphones disappear. But at the same time, we can now (more) safely restore some focus on our Windows (and macOS!) desktop applications as it seems they will continue to bring us good revenue in the future too, while – of course – we can keep an eye on the monthly GlobalStats as well, just in case.